Rule Forty Two: The Self-Aggrandizing Website of Gavin Edwards

On a New York City street.

The left boot was nowhere in sight.

posted 12 March 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

It takes only three seconds to wave away the fetid smell of Paul Carrack: some squealing tires and a synthesized drum roll announce the arrival of Robert Barisford Brown. Immediately, “My Prerogative” whacks your eardrums with its greatness. New jack swing never got any better than this. Criminally, I don’t think I’ve heard this single since it fell off the charts two decades ago, either because oldies stations shy away from ’80s R&B, or because Bobby Brown became more famous for getting stupid with Whitney Houston.

A hyperactive band gets into a funky groove onstage. We cut away to a Mercedes: getting out of the driver’s seat is Bobby Brown. He walks down an alley, moving briskly but not hurrying. I didn’t know it was possible to saunter at high speed. He’s wearing a black quasi-military outfit and although it appears to be night, sunglasses. Brown gets into an old-fashioned elevator and pulls the collapsible metal door shut.

As the elevator goes down, Brown starts singing (the chorus, which in this song comes before the first verse). He’s acquired a headset microphone–maybe he carries one in his pocket? His elevator delivers him right to the stage and he bursts out dancing. Brown then takes off his sunglasses, which seems a little odd, since he’s now under the bright stage lights and might actually want them.

Brown’s dancing between two scantily clad girls, one with a large white keytar, the other (somewhat less plausibly, given the backing track) with a saxophone. Each of the girls is flanked by a male dancer; most of the time, the guys are kept out of the frame.

Brown, it turns out, is an excellent dancer. It’s not just his superior footwork and rhythm–it’s how he swaggers his way through the whole routine. Brown waggles his finger, letting us see the expensive gold watch on his wrist. He does a side-stepping move, showing off his groundbreaking trousers: they’re loose in that harem-pants way, although not as extreme as the baggy-diaper look that MC Hammer would employ in 1990. (I remember an interview around that time where a mystified Brown reported that Hammer had phoned him asking for permission to wear those pants.) Speaking of harbingers of future fashion statements: Brown’s hair is styled in a conventional flattop in this video, not the asymmetrical Gumby cut he would soon adopt.

Closeup on the drummer, who appears to have wandered in from a pirate mariachi band: he’s got a black-and-orange jacket, a wide-brimmed black hat, a large hoop earring, a bolo tie, and a rakish mustache. Well, at least he looks happy.

Second chorus: Brown athletically throws his shoulders into his dance moves, and we get to consider how “prerogative” is a distinctive four-syllable word to build a song around. We get quick cuts of three different guys singing and playing banks of synthesizers. If this were an actual live show instead of a video, I would suspect them of being the musical muscle behind this song. (I believe one of them is producer Teddy Riley.)

We’re treated to lots of reaction shots of the audience, who are predictably enthusiastic and mostly female. “Ego trips is not my thing,” sings Brown, in the least convincing lyric in the song. He’s got a metallic piece of jewelry on the left breast of his quasi-uniform–I suspect it’s meant to evoke military medals, but it looks more like the captain’s wings they used to give young children on airplanes.

Brown hops from one foot to the other, doing a pumped-up version of a Pee-Wee Herman dance. The saxophonist pretends to play her instrument. We reach the bridge, which seems like a good time to mention that when I watched this countdown the first time, on New Year’s Eve 1988 with a bunch of friends, we got into an argument about whether the word was actually “prerogative” or “perogative.” I thought the latter and went so far as to find a dictionary to prove my case. Um, I was wrong.

Brown steps behind the keytarist, moving in time with her, and plays her keytar. “Yo, Teddy, kick it like this,” Brown says, and the keytarist ducks down to the ground, letting him swing his right leg through the air in a roundhouse kick. That’s an awfully literal interpretation of “kick it.” Then for good measure, Brown grinds against the saxophonist, although he doesn’t bother to finger her instrument.

Brown struts down to the lip of the stage, shaking his shoulders, and delivers his monologue, pointing at the audience and talking straight into the camera: “What is this, a [mystery word] that I can’t have money in my pocket and people not talk about me? This world is a trip! I don’t know what’s going on these days. I got this person over here talking about me, this person. Hey, listen, let me tell you something, it’s my prerogative, I can do what I want to do. I made this money, you didn’t. Right, Ted? We out of here.” I initially thought the mystery word was “business,” but it doesn’t really sound like it. Some online lyrics sites say “blizzard,” but that makes no sense (plus it doesn’t sound right either). “Visit,” maybe?

As the song heads to the fade, Brown shakes his pelvis like somebody selected “puree.”

“My Prerogative” hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. (So what’s it doing all the way down at #57 here? It was still climbing the charts, and wouldn’t reach the top until 1989. I don’t know whether it also placed on the following year’s countdown.) You can watch the video here.

posted 11 March 2010 in 1988. 4 comments

Another excerpt from the Andy Warhol Diaries. The other person in “we” is Bianca Jagger:

Tuesday, January 3, 1978

We cabbed up to 86th Street ($2.75) and we finally hit Saturday Night Fever at the right time and were able to get in. Well, the movie was just great. That bridge thing was the best scene–and the lines were great. I guess it’s the new kind of fantasy movie, you’re supposed to stay where you are. The old movies were things like Dead End and you had to get out of the dead end and make it to Park Avenue and now they’re telling you that it’s better off to stay where you are in Brooklyn–to avoid Park Avenue because it would just make you unhappy. It’s about people who would never even think about crossing the bridge, that’s the fantasy. And they played up Travolta’s big solo dance number, but then at the end they made the dance number with the girl so nothing, so underplayed. They were smart. And New York looked so exciting, didn’t it? The Brooklyn Bridge and New York. Stevie Rubell wants to do a disco movie, but I don’t think you could do another one, this one was so great. But why didn’t they do it as a play first? What was this first, a short story? They should have milked it–done it as a play first and it would have run forever.

posted 9 March 2010 in Excerpts. 2 comments

Another photograph from the Great Wall of China:

posted 5 March 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

Recently, I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview the gentlemen of Pavement for Rolling Stone. You can now read the resulting article, detailing what they’ve been doing for the past decade and how they got back together–but it’s not online, so you’ll have to pick up a copy of the new issue (featuring my old friend Shaun White on the cover). Delightfully, the same issue also includes an interview with Billy Corgan, meaning that the magazine appears to be doing its best to reignite the old “Range Life” feud.

A paragraph that didn’t fit into the article:

What’s the most rock-star thing about you?
Spiral Stairs: “My name.”
Mark Ibold: “My expensive taste in liquors.”
Steve West: “My beard. And my glasses.”
Bob Nastanovich: “I can scream like a rock star.”
Stephen Malkmus: “I’m pretty fucking skinny.”

posted 3 March 2010 in Articles. no comments yet

I was thinking about musicians who have belonged to at least two major rock bands. There’s a lot of them, so let’s narrow it down: I’m interested in the sidemen, not stars like Dave Grohl or Eric Clapton. For our purposes today, spinoff projects don’t count (where two or more people from one band start another band together), and supergroups don’t either.

1. Jerry Harrison (Modern Lovers, Talking Heads)
2. Pat Smear (Germs, Nirvana)
3. David Robinson (Modern Lovers, Cars)
4. Jack Irons (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam)
5. Matt Sorum (The Cult, Guns N’ Roses)

That was off the top of my head, and I’m sure there’s plenty more. What resume-builders did I forget? Bonus points for naming non-drummers.

posted 1 March 2010 in Tasty Bits. 8 comments

Two photos from lower Manhattan:

posted 26 February 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

Three ways to look at Paul Carrack’s career: (1) He’s a second-tier Brit singer for hire, working with middlebrow acts that ranged from the good (Squeeze) to the craptastic (Mike + the Mechanics). (2) All those painful collaborations with Roger Waters and Don Felder just subsidized Carrack’s secret calling as a hipster, letting him play keyboards with Roxy Music, Nick Lowe, the Pretenders, and the Smiths. (3) He’s part of a controlled experiment to show what Daryl Hall’s life would have been like if he had never met John Oates: a white soul singer with good chops who drifted from project to project, never finding a mustache to call his own.

We return from the commercial break to find Carrack sitting at an electric piano, playing a pretty good solo version of Mike + the Mechanics’ “Silent Running,” a #6 hit from 1986 that he sang lead vocals on. Given that the group is the side project of a Genesis guitarist, a certain amount of geeky sub-Heinleinisms might be expected in the lyrics, but really–”Believe in me / I’m with the high command”?

We cut to Kevin Seal, sitting down in front of an electronic drum kit. “The very soulful Paul Carrack,” he says, “tinkling the plastics on our studio Korg Sampling Grand,” dutifully plugging the brand name. “Eighty-eight was a good year for Paul Carrack: he continued to get hits off his third solo album, he had a collection of hits put out, The Carrack Collection, which is some of his best work over the years from the many groups he’s been associated with. A new Mike and the Mechanics album came out, The Living Years, he plays on that, he’s going to go on tour in ‘89. He was in that hit comedy, Buster. No, who am I thinking of?” Seal puts his palm against his forehead. “The other guy.”

When the video opens, a luscious young female model is behind the wheel of a large American car: several pearl necklaces hang from the rear-view mirror. She wearily leans her head back, and suddenly the image is one of two on the screen, framed by blotches of paint and the words “El Centro” and a crossed-out “North Shore 10/87.” The technology that made this possible is probably the same that was used to hang images on clothing lines in the Belinda Carlisle video, but the conceit here is that it looks like a fashion photographer’s diary with Polaroids pasted in–we’re just getting a peek at a beautiful girl wandering around California, just north of the Mexican border.

The camera pans over a small sun-baked town. We get two simultaneous shots of the model, whose hair now looks darker–she’s wearing a man’s white shirt and not much else. In both close-up and a wide shot, she slams the door to a motel room.

Then we’re inside the car, with the windshield wipers going: according to the handwriting on the screen, we are now in Indio, which is about eighty miles north of El Centro, on the other side of the Salton Sea (and coincidentally, next to Coachella of festival fame). Two video panels show similar vistas of California desert. The model drives. She rests her left knee against the car door and doesn’t pay much attention to the road.

Carrack starts singing, and twenty-five seconds in, the director can no longer avoid the fact that his video is supposed to star a thirty-seven-year-old semi-fashionable Brit with thinning hair. Carrack stands in front of a pier, wearing what appears to be a black-and-yellow varsity jacket, and aggressively bobbing his head.

The model gets out of the car. It’s a big orange American mid-century boat of a vehicle. She preens in a gas station parking lot, in front of a hand-made sign promising ice-cold beer and soda and (presumably room-temperature) cigarettes. She looks like she’s waiting for somebody to deliver whatever water was fashionable for two weeks in early October 1987. If this video had been made today, she’d be on her cell phone.

Carrack keeps singing. He looks like the cool dad at the high-school basketball game. Somebody’s given him a microphone on a stand, which helps sell the notion that he’s not just some guy who wandered on camera at the video shoot. Carrack stops the head-bobbing and moves his shoulders forward rhythmically, one at a time, switching from side to side as if he were a Raelett.

The model wanders around aimlessly, through the plastic strips of an unused car wash. She checks herself out in a mirror, and then gets in the car and drives some more. We next see her on a beach, peering around with one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. For no apparent reason, she starts running on the sand, revealing that she’s wearing a tight black sleeveless top and sheer black stockings. Despondent over her failure to pack appropriate beachwear on her vacation, she falls to her knees in the sand.

In most of this video, there’s two shots going on simultaneously, usually of the model, but sometimes Carrack elbows his way in too. Model outfit #4: black dress with white polka dots, with a flimsy black scarf wrapped around her head. She stands around someplace vaguely industrial, with puddles and telephone poles. The wind blows in her hair, and then she covers her face with the scarf.

This song, by the way, is utterly forgettable. Neither the melody nor the lyrics (a kiss-off to a bad love affair) are memorable, and the whole thing is so overproduced, it just slides off your ears and makes a nasty stain on your shirt. Carrack’s sings, “Don’t shed a tear for me / My life won’t end without you,” but the model looks like she’s having a good time, not giving him a second thought.

Carrack reaches the bridge: the director takes the opportunity to do a quick montage of all the model’s various outfits so far. Then the model pulls up to what appears to be the takeout window of a closed Dairy Queen. She gets out of the car, now wearing a spaghetti-strap little black dress, and leans against the DQ, tossing her hair around, wondering why nobody’s bringing her food.

We head for the fade, and the model is asked to look tearful, presumably to tie her experiences in with the title. It doesn’t work, partially because she’s not a very good actress, partially because it makes more sense for this bad-news betty not to care, partially because Carrack looks more like her dad than her estranged lover.

The video ends with the model dangling a pair of pants that have been lit on fire. They’re burning pretty well, so they’ve been soaked in gasoline–or they’re polyester and she’s about to keel over from the fumes. She dangles them from her right hand, then tosses them towards the car. You get the feeling that the director’s original treatment said the car would blow up in a spectacular fireball, but the video didn’t have the budget.

“Don’t Shed a Tear” peaked at #9 on the Billboard charts. You can watch it here.

posted 25 February 2010 in 1988. 5 comments

Never let it be said I don’t finish what I start: this is the last photo in the flipwalk project.

I’ve been working on this for almost six years–admittedly, with some long gaps along the way.

As usual, the above is just a teaser image; for the full picture and the story of how I got there, click here.

In coming weeks, I’m planning to tote up some of the data from the 48 walks. I may also try a Los Angeles flipwalk, although I’m not sure the project directly translates here.

When I went on flipwalk #48, I didn’t know that it was going to be the last one in the project, but I’m glad I ended up in one of my favorite places in New York (Battery Park) looking at the work of one of my favorite public artists (Tom Otterness). Downtown Manhattan was a place of great sorrow for me, but it was also a place of great joy. Thank you all for walking with me.

posted 19 February 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

A scrap of paper isolated on a black screen has the single typed word “sexy.” It’s followed by two quick flashes of dancing bodies–a little bit of skin, and a whole lot of fringe.

Then we get a closeup on a light-skinned black woman, speaking with a British accent–why, that’s Downtown Julie Brown! This must be a promo for Club MTV! She says, “There are certain people that, um, come up with steps that I would never even dream of.”

Two scraps of paper: “the” and “Dancers.” A sweaty black guy pushes back his hair. Back to Julie: “People like R.J., who come up with some feisty little moves.” We see R.J., frantically stamping his right leg, and then a closeup on a girl’s bustier.

Another scrap of paper: “hot.” Back to Julie, who is wearing a black top hat and dangling silver star earrings: “There are a couple of people that I like to see dance together.” We get a quick clip of two people of indeterminate gender dancing, one light-skinned, one dark-skinned. Back to Julie: “It’s nice to see guys up there, freaking out.” She continues talking over more quick edits of dancers: “It’s nice to see the guys going up there and baring all. With their chest out and stuff.” Back to Julie, now grinning. “I like that.”

The promo ends with the Club MTV logo. In case you never saw it, Club MTV was a dance-party show that featured Downtown Julie Brown introducing the club singles of the day while teenagers danced to them: basically, American Bandstand with a modern haircut. It was much less stylish than this promo, mostly because Brown was a ditz who liked to say “wubba wubba wubba” a lot.

Again, the ad for the License to Drive videocassette. One of the Coreys (Haim, I think, although I can’t rule out Feldman) lays out the plot: “An innocent girl. A harmless drive. What could possibly go wrong?”

Next up, the hugely insane Coca-Cola ad featuring robots and Earth, Wind and Fire. The lyrics to the funky EWF jingle: “The feeling’s real / You know it can’t be beat / Get started to the system / You can feel it in your feet / Owww! / The taste is live / Feel the magic that it brings / The ultimate sensation when you’ve got the real thing / Coca-Cola Classic / You can feel it / Can’t beat the feeling!” Get started to the system?

Gillette, once more promising that they are the best a man can get, have another in their series of ads that blend European footage with some new American shots. Quick cuts: guys in tuxes, woman adjusting man’s tie, man on phone pumping fist in victory, guy running track and dripping with sweat, hero shot of AtraPlus razor, man putting shaving cream on his young son’s face, just-married couple heading for limo but interrupted by hug from groom’s father, football team scoring touchdown, father spotting young son as he lifts five-pound barbell, father and young son combing hair together in mirror, older guy dropping car keys in younger guy’s hand, father cradling infant son, and sweet mother of Christ, there’s only so much father-son bonding that one man can recap.

Another videocassette ad: The Presidio, which starred Sean Connery and Mark Harmon. Connery appears to be over-acting while wearing a military uniform and a fake mustache, while Harmon gets head-butted by a criminal he’s trying to slap handcuffs onto. And somebody runs, and there’s an exploding upside-down car. Nobody gets started to the system.

We end with a comedic bumper for MTV, featuring a tourist in a Russian airport, tied and gagged at customs, struggling while the Russian customs agents look through his suitcase. “Do you have anything to declare?” asks the female agent. “In this sock, you have other sock?” She breathes in the aroma of the sock. “Declare something!” she cries. This promo is pretty much the last gasp of Cold War humor: the following year, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and soon after, Yakov Smirnoff’s career was on the rocks.

posted 17 February 2010 in 1988. 5 comments